Movie Friday: STORM (Tim Minchin)

I’m not going to lie, this might be one of the greatest things ever written.

I’ve had too many first dates with the Storms of the world, especially since moving to Vancouver where critical thinking skills seem to be out of fashion. It’s perfectly reasonable to say that we don’t know how to explain everything in the world. That’s just the facts. However, that doesn’t mean we get to make up fairy stories to fill in the blanks, and until you can provide me with some facts or some logic to demonstrate the veracity of your claims, you’re just telling me made-up fairy stories. You don’t deserve any more respect than Mother Goose for believing in ghosts, spirits, reincarnation, astrology, or any of the other millions of fairy stories people try to pass off as fact. If you’ve got some evidence to show they’re right, I’ll happily look at it. If the evidence conflicts with my beliefs, I’ll happily change my mind. But don’t expect me to fake some kind of respect for your belief in magic wands or Feng Shui unless you’ve got real evidence to show me.

Also, how awesome is it that the whole thing is in rhyme?

Movie Friday: Religion… not just INTELLECTUALLY bankrupt

I have a headache after watching this video:

No mention of the fact that the “Christian” United States and its ultra-capitalist system is what got the recession rolling in the first place. No mention of the complete contradiction inherent in the argument that people shouldn’t wait around for the government to help… they should just wait for God (who’s about 5000 years overdue – any day now though…). The only voice of reason got sandwiched in between the moron host and the more moronic priest who somehow manages to make arguments on both sides of his own point. The host’s final statement made me chuckle: they could have put something newsworthy on, but instead we talked to a priest who knows less about economics than he does about secularism (or Christianity, it seems – Jesus was definitely a socialist; “render unto Caesar” and all that…)

Secularism doesn’t make you poor, secularism makes you make decisions that are based on what is good for others rather than what it says in a religious tome. Can that socialist instinct take you too far? Absolutely. But right now we’re all living through what happens when capitalism allows to go unchecked.

I’m not smarter than these people because I’m an atheist; I’m an atheist because I’m smarter than these people.

Movie Friday: The Christian Right in Canada

We can no longer afford to believe the lie that Canada is immune from the religious fervour that is ruining the United States.

It’s happening here too.

What can we expect when the Christian Right takes over? Goodbye free speech when it comes to discussion of religion. Goodbye freedom of religion (obviously). Goodbye personal freedoms of many kinds, as well as gay rights and abortion rights. Hello religious tests for political office, creationism in schools, and probably finding a way to throw God into the national anthem a couple more times.

Anyone who says that religion is harmless and is a personal choice that nobody is trying to force on anyone else, I say that you are talking out of your arse sir, and I would like you to teach me to do that trick.

Movie Friday: God Hates Fred Phelps

Some things are so unbelievably over-the-top evil that you just have to laugh (DISCLAIMER: if you are easily offended by strident and hateful homophobia, you might not want to watch this):

For those of you who don’t know, Fred Phelps is the head of a ultra-right-wing hate group that calls itself the Westboro Baptist Church (link not safe for work). The group is famous for its slogan: “God Hates Fags”. As Freddie reveals here, God hates pretty much everyone and everything. Fred’s God is kind of a dick, actually – He wants them to picket military funerals and funerals for kids killed by homophobic hate crimes. Of course Fred’s God doesn’t exist any more than anyone else’s – he’s just using the idea of YahwAlladdha to push his own small-minded puritanical agenda. The sad thing is that children are brought up in this group, and taught to believe that hating people who you don’t like is a virtue. Fred’s no better than the Taliban or Al Qaeda leaders who seduce kids into suicide bombing

Fred is bent out of shape in this video because his group was denied entry into Canada under the auspices of the hate speech laws. As much as I disagree with them, they do have at least one useful upside: they kept the WBC out of my country. Fred is right to castigate Canada for not having completely free speech; however, that is entirely immaterial. Canada’s laws guarantee free speech to Canadians, not damn dirty foreigners. Keep your bigotry and your Dick God on your side of the 49th, Freddie baby!

Any country that a guy like Fred has such contempt for is one that I am proud to be a member of, and I will wear the title of “fag enabler” proudly. I also rather like Michael Moore’s response to this walking scum.

Sometimes the only thing you can do in the face of overwhelming evil is highlight how ridiculous and risible it is.

Movie Friday: Never been kissed

I’ve talked before about religion’s bizarre obsession with sex. This video made me laugh, but it’s not really funny.

It’s about the most thinly-veiled abstinence advocacy I’ve ever seen. It goes beyond sexual celibacy and says that even kissing is off limits. I’ve seen little kids smooch each other. It’s about as small a deal as can possibly be. Kissing is a expression of affection that seems to be universal. If you’re lucky enough to receive a kiss from someone you care about, it’s an amazing thing. Why anyone would want to deny people such a simple pleasure baffles the rational mind.

There’s also a very telling moment, where the dad says:

What kind of man do you want your husband to be? Do you want a man who saved all his love just for you? One who never even kissed another woman, so he could share that just with you?

Seems like you got some of the words wrong there, dad. Let me fix that for you:

What kind of man do you want your husband to be? Do you want a man who has no clue what the hell he’s doing? One who’s never even kissed another woman, so he has essentially zero shot of being able to gratify you sexually?

There, much more accurate. They of course don’t show the kiss between the husband and wife, since the sight of Johnny Haircut slobbering all over her face as he tries to wrap his lips around hers would be a bit too much to handle. I’ve seen bad kissers; I’ve been kissed by bad kissers. Some people need all the practice they can get.

The guy who asks Pamela out and tries to kiss her is right to smirk – she straight out runs away from him. And it wouldn’t be a heavy-handed awkward Christian morality play unless there was some girl who kissed her boyfriend… with disastrous consequences (note: consequences not shown, just vaguely alluded to). Let’s assume she had sex with her boyfriend out of a sense of obligation. The problem isn’t kissing in this case, it’s that her friend is a spineless moron. If you’re not ready to have sex, you’ve got to learn to say so. When we don’t have honest discussions about sex with our children, this is the kind of shit that happens. It’s not because we didn’t tie their chastity belts on tight enough; it’s because we didn’t give them the wherewithal to say “I’m in charge of my sexuality.”

Some guys I know are still wowie-zowie about virgins. I’m 25 years old – if I meet a girl my age who’s a virgin, I’m wondering what happened in her past to make her that way. There’s nothing inherently wrong with not having sex, but it’s definitely unusual. “Saving yourself” for marriage is basically condemning your would-be spouse to having to teach you how to fuck. Sex is fun, and when done properly, is safe. Fetishizing sex and constructing elaborate taboos about what is essentially a biological function only serves to make us more obsessed, and more likely to do something stupid and dangerous.

John Legend gets it EXACTLY right

I’ve said this before, it’s REALLY nice to hear my ideas coming out of the mouths of other people:

John Legend says its okay to see race (sorry, embed code was refusing to work and I don’t know enough HTML to troubleshoot it).

John Legend is a singer/songwriter who has collaborated often with the likes of Common, Mos Def and Kanye West. He’s also a really smart guy, apparently.

“…I’m black and I love being black, and I don’t want somebody to love me despite the fact that I’m black or be blind to the fact that I’m black and love me; I just want them to love me for whoever I am individually. But it’s okay that you see me as a black guy too.”

He’s absolutely right, incidentally, about how to get racist ideologies out of the public narrative: tear down the stereotypes. Not simply by saying the stereotypes are wrong, but by surrounding people with examples of how they’re wrong.

Movie Friday: Hurray for Cartoons!

I love cartoons. I always have. Even now that I am more grown up, I still get a thrill from watching shows like South Park, Clone High, The Simpsons, and others. Animation is a way of portraying the world without being fettered by reality.

Then again, sometimes cartoons are so racist you wish they would stick a bit closer to reality. This week’s Movie Friday is about the history of race portrayal in cartoons. In light of my previous post about the Tintin book, I thought it would be worthwhile to examine our history in North America. This post is a two-fer, but overlap a bit.

Cracked.com made  a great deal of hay about the contents of this specific video, and the article is worth checking out.

The second video has had embedding disabled, so you’ll just have to follow this link if you want to watch it. It’s more of the same though. Racial differences are exaggerated and lampooned for sport. It is tempting to castigate the creators of these cartoons for their racism, but I see it as being simply a reflection of the ethos of the day. There are lots of examples of racist attitudes prevailing in today’s television. As one example, there are no non-white characters on Friends, Seinfeld, or How I Met Your Mother, despite the fact that they all take place in New York City with a huge non-white population. We haven’t rid ourselves of racism; it’s simply been transformed into something less obvious.

Writer/director Spike Lee, with whom I do not always agree, created an excellent film about this phenomenon called Bamboozled. While he, of course, focused on black people in the United States, the lessons can be extracted to portrayals of any ethnic minority groups. I can’t recommend enough that everyone watch this movie. It is an eye-opening and perspective-changing view of race in media, and the phenomenon of subverted systemic racism in North America. Seriously, watch this movie.

So the next time you’re watching your favourite show, spend a segment looking at race portrayal with a critical eye and see if you can’t detect some race bias. It’s often subtle, but it’s definitely there.

Movie Friday: Dave Chappelle – Native Americans

Dave Chappelle is one of the most insightful comedians in the US. It’s sad that most people are forever going to know him only for his Rick James impression. Here’s a bit of his standup:

I see a lot of parallels between the black struggle for economic and political power in Canada and that of the First Nations. Obviously there are real differences – Native people have been here for generations and were supplanted by European settlers; black people were forcibly kidnapped and taken to North America as slave labour. There are real historical differences, but many of the after-effects are similar. Racialicious has many authors speaking from the Native perspective, and I am learning a lot. If the topic interests you at all, you should check them out.

Movie Friday: Eddie Izzard – Whales ‘n’ God

Today’s movie features one of my all-time favourite comedians: Eddie Izzard. Sometimes remembered as the “Lost Python” from Monty Python, you might recognize him from Ocean’s 13. At any rate, he’s a wildly funny comedian who often riffs on religion as part of his routines. It’s hard to pick just one bit to exhibit, so I picked one at random.

There’s no lesson on this one, he’s just really funny.

Movie Friday: Sam Harris at TED

A common defense of religious belief and practice is that without religion (and the teachings of the holy books), there would be no morality. In a historical, practical sense this is at least partially true. Morals were dictated and enforced by religious authority, and justified on religious grounds – God says not to steal, therefore we will punish stealing. However, it is important to recognize that just because something has worked in the past, that does not make it true, nor does it mean we must continue to use it when we have much better alternatives. As Brian Lychenhaun noted in his presentation that I talked about on Wednesday, not only is it possible to make moral decisions without relying on religious teachings, we do it already. I would argue (and, I think, so would Brian) that it is in fact better to make moral decisions that are informed by critical thinking and logic rather than relying on a mistranslated text written thousands of years ago that invoke, as their reasoning, an entity whose existence cannot be proven.

Author Sam Harris makes a similar argument that science can inform our moral decisions. He does so at TED, which is a lecture series given by prominent scientists, authors and thinkers. If you haven’t watched TED videos before, you should. I promise not to make every Movie Friday a TED lecture, but they will show up with regularity because they’ve got some really fantastic ideas. Anyway, check out the video:

I am with Sam most of the way. I think he fails to make a solidly coherent point – I’m sure he has one, but he seems to dance around it a bit. The central thesis seems to be that values reduce to facts, and we can examine and test the truth of those facts. Knowledge of those facts will help inform the decisions we make. I’m with him only part of the way. He uses “values” in a more colloquial way than I do. He seems to be talking about decisions and policies whereas I see values as the set of emotional and mental prescripts that underpin those decisions – being anti-abortion is not a “value”, it is a position that is driven by the underlying emotional opinion that human beings come into existence at the moment of conception. Of course, that value can be examined by science, but there needs to first be a definition of what a “human” is. However, the take-away message (or at least the one that I took away) is that we can use science and the scientific method (logic applied to agreed-upon first principles, verified by observation) to answer moral questions. We do not need religion, as religious texts are not comprehensive enough to give reliable answers in the face of novel ethical dilemmas.

I also particularly love the section where he throws away the tired liberal doctrine of “who are we to say that another culture/practice/person is wrong?” He turns it right back on its head and asks “who are we not to say?” We can establish standards for what is right and wrong, based on an agreed-upon first principle of ‘good’. We can test the value of that ‘goodness’ through logic and observation – if adherence to scripture is ‘the good’, what effect will that have? Is that a desirable effect for human survival and social stability? Harris offers “human happiness” as an idea for ‘the good’, which is the basic principle held by secular humanists. Sure it has its flaws but it is far superior (for humans, who are the ones making the decisions) to any religious exhortation to please the invisible YahwAlladdha.

I also love the lines that he goes out on:

“We can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notion of how disease spreads or the safety standards of large buildings or airplanes. We simply must converge on the answers we give to the most important questions in human life; and to do that, we have to admit these questions have answers.”

Just fantastic.